Is the Creation of States (Polities) Justified? By What Means?

[sc94597]

MDMAlliance said:

sc94597 said:

MDMAlliance said:

I'll make this simple, actually.  The key word here is "justification." 

Ethics is used to justify decisions. So the key word is indeed "justification", which theory of ethics enables one to create a state? For example, one can argue on a utilitarian basis that the existence of the state benefits more people than there would otherwise be without a state. That is an normative claim, yes, but still falls within normative ethics, and if we speak of a specific situation it would fall within Applied ethics. 

While ethics are used for justifications, that doesn't mean you can have an intelligent discussion about justifications.  What this would end up being is a back-and-forth about whether something is or isn't.

What any intelligent discussion on this topic will be about will NOT be about justification.  It will be about the finer details themselves, which also somewhat disappears when there's no real defined state.  Not everyone agrees on what constitutes a state.  There is, at some point, a blurry line between state and non-state actors.  That, in my opinion, becomes the second problem when trying to talk about this topic intellectually.  

What are we using as the basis for defining a state?  This quote from your OP is the reason why it's hard to even give an intelligent answer to the question in the OP to begin with.

"So my question is: how do states form, who is able to form them, and why do they represent the opinion of all individuals residing in a land, not only at the time of creation, but for generations afterwards? "

I'm thinking maybe your question really isn't about states themselves, but more about governments in general. 

We don't need a unified definition of a state. The question pertained to one's personal justification for one's specific concept of the state. The purpose of this thread was to spark a sharing of ideas in regards to why states "should" exist. In order to explain why they "should" exist, one must appeal to some form of ethics. This is all intellectual, because it is the first step in determing differences between political ideologies. That is useful, because it allows one to frame all other political arguments from one's knowledge of the underlying ethics beneath this political question. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justification_for_the_state#Political_ideologies

There is no single, universally accepted justification of the state. In fact, anarchists believe that there is no justification for the state at all, and that human societies would be better off without it. However, most political ideologies have their own justifications, and thus their own vision of what constitutes a legitimate state. Indeed, a person's opinions regarding the role of government often determine the rest of their political ideology. Thus, discrepancy of opinion in a wide array of political matters is often directly traceable back to a discrepancy of opinion in the justification for the state.

I do have to admit that the question was poorly phrased. Let me refine it

"So my question is: how do states form, who is able to form them, and why should they be formed and continually exist."